Page 263 of Slashed Bonds

Valerie stares at me.

A long moment. The wine-red knot, the pencil through it, the two full sleeves gone still on her crossed arms. She doesn’t say I’m sorry. She doesn’t say anything, which is how I know she heard it.

Then she nods.

Once. And she goes back to the tablet, and two small shapes appear, barely bigger than the stud in my lip, and she prints again, and this time when she lays the stencil on she positions the big monarch across the back of my hand and the two small ones down the side of my ring finger, one above the other, where a band would sit.

“So when you have a wedding band and a ring,” she says, pressing the stencil flat with her palm, “it’ll be like the butterflies have landed on top of it.”

I laugh.

Nervous. Too high. And then the vision does the thing visions do, which is arrive whether you’ve invited it or not, and I’m grinning at my own hand like an idiot while a woman presses purple paper to it.

Marriage.

I didn’t marry Theo. None of them. We did the packship, the registration, the paperwork that keeps a roster eligible and an Omega on a sheet, and I’d told myself at eighteen that it was the same thing and it wasn’t. It was a contract to stop four men from losing their careers. A rider. There was no aisle. There was a notary in a room that smelled like printer toner and Theo checking his phone during the signatures.

To walk down an aisle. To have a thing with music and a dress and my hand in someone’s and three someones at the end of it. I’m allowed to dream. I’ve got a woman drawing the dream on my finger.

“A nice manifestation,” I hum, “to have come true one day.”

Valerie peels the stencil. Checks it. Nods. Then she turns to the tray and starts preparing the ink, and the reservoir on the machine gets a cartridge pressed into it that’s darker than ink should be, with a sheen to it under the lamp like oil on a puddle.

“Vicious Ink’s process is a bit different,” she says. Conversational. Hands busy. “We instill the ink with properties that rejuvenate and heal. Hormones. Cells. The things in a body that get knocked sideways and don’t come back on their own.”

“Is that why you needed a blood test?”

I’d given it Tuesday. A nurse in the office I’d assumed was Dox’s girlfriend, two vials, a form I’d signed without reading because Cassian had already read it.

“I thought you were checking we weren’t high or something.”

“It helps to not be high.” A small smile. “The compound reacts. Ask the frat kids we’ve been turning away. But yes. The panel tells us where you are. If you’ve got a level that’s in the floor, we know what to load the pigment with. If you’ve got something in your blood that’ll fight the pigment, we know to wait.” She clicks the cartridge home. “All certified. Obviously. Dox has a wall of paper upstairs that says so.”

Lessard’s panels. The ones she ran while I slept. Built to maintain, not heal, she said. And this woman’s about to put something in my hand that was built to do the other thing.

“It releases slow,” Valerie says. “Into the blood, over time. Weeks. You may get a side effect at the start, nausea, maybe vomiting, while it establishes. That’s it finding the hormones and arguing with them. But once it’s blended, you’ll feel like a hundred bucks.” She looks at me. “It does wonders for Omegas, especially. The med shit they give us, the standard protocol, the stuff that’s on every chart in the country, it fucks us up. Flattens everything so we’re easy to manage. This usually corrects it. For the better.”

“No wonder you’re booked out five years.”

“If the demand’s for something that finally benefits Omegas,” she says, “while encouraging the creative beauty of artistry on one’s flesh, there’ll always be a list of people yearning to experience it.”

She lets that sit a second. Then shrugs, one shoulder, the sleeve moving.

“I’m booked up because it’s hard to find an Omega tattoo artist who gives a fuck. That’s the whole list.”

“You’re right,” I admit.

Nikolai’s inked first. I know that from a car at two in the morning, from Killian, who tells me things in cars. Seventeen, before any of the rest of it, a boy with a mother in the ground and a Switch nobody had a name for yet, walking into this basement because somebody at a rink had told him there was a man who could make the noise in his head go quieter. Dox put the first piece on his ribs. The one he keeps turned away. And the noise got quieter, and he came back, and he’s been coming back for five years with a body that’s more Dox’s work than skin.

Killian came after the bathroom floor. Cassian after a broadcaster and a committee letter. Three men in a basement with a needle in them, kept from going feral by a thing in the pigment that bleeds slow into the blood.

And none of them ever had a woman in this chair. Val’s the only Omega on the roster and she’s got a five-year list, and the first slot that opened was mine, and I’m not stupid enough to think that’s a coincidence. It’s a nod across a lounge. It’s “right strings.”

And I relax.

Into the chair. I feel it happen, my shoulders dropping, my hand going loose on the armrest under the lamp, the way my whole body went loose on a frozen ridge with a man’s hand in mine. Across the room Cassian’s finished the paperwork and is leaning on the counter with his arms crossed watching me, and Nikolai’s got Knox’s whole head in his lap now and is watching me, and Killian’s put the plastic stick in his pocket and is watching me, and none of them has said a word, and they don’t need to.

Three men. One hand. And in a minute, the same thing on theirs.